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Lobbying Titan Tommy Boggs Is Dead at 73, Months After His Firm Merged - Businessweek

Lobbying Titan Tommy Boggs Is Dead at 73, Months After His Firm Merged

By Paul M. Barrett September 15, 2014 6:48 PM EDT

Photograph by Bill Clark/Roll Call/Getty Images Boggs
In May, Patton Boggs, the archetypal Washington law-and-lobbying firm, lost its independence after a half-century at the center of the capital’s influence trade. Five months later, Thomas H. Boggs Jr., the firm’s co-founder and the scion of a legendary Louisiana political clan, has died of a heart attack. He was 73.

Boggs’s hometown paper, the Washington Post, offered this tribute:

With a gregarious charisma that even his nemeses among good-government groups found hard to resist, Mr. Boggs spent four decades as a heavyweight in Washington influence peddling. Sometimes attending three fundraisers in a single night, he had a shrewd understanding of how the city operated behind the public view—how to get to people in a position of power and how to win their support.

“The best lobbyist in Washington is a member of Congress who agrees with you and is willing to lobby for you,” he once told an interviewer. “He may not want to play a front role if he has a constituency that is against what you are trying to get him to do, but your best bet is still to try to convince a member to be your lobbyist.”

By pedigree, Mr. Boggs had grown up in a home where Democratic politics was the family business. His father, a Louisiana congressman, rose to U.S. House majority leader and died in a plane crash over Alaska in 1972. His mother, known as Lindy, won the special election for her husband’s seat and served nine terms in Congress before President Clinton named her U.S. ambassador to the Holy See at the Vatican. …

National Journal called the firm “an icon of Washington’s mercenary culture” and wrote of Mr. Boggs, a Democrat who gave large amounts of money to Democratic officeseekers, that he was “ready to cash in on Clinton.” Rather than protesting, Mr. Boggs reportedly put the article on his office wall, explaining that the aggressively descriptive language was likely to lure more business.

Boggs’s clients ranged from prominent plaintiffs’ attorneys seeking to defeat tort reform, insurance companies working against health-reform, and bankers battling financial regulation. But it was Patton Boggs’s involvement in an unusual engagement against Chevron in an oil pollution case in Ecuador that contributed to the erosion of the firm’s brand name, a loss of partners, and, in May, its merger with the larger Squire Sanders law firm based in Cleveland.

Here’s an a May 27 dispatch on the surprising decline of Patton Boggs:

Involvement in the [Chevron] litigation became acutely problematic for Patton Boggs in March, when a federal judge in New York ruled in that a multibillion-dollar judgment won against Chevron in 2011 had been the product of fraud and coercion in the Ecuadorian courts. Patton Boggs had allied itself with the New York plaintiffs’ lawyer, Steven Donziger, who was found to be the architect of that elaborate corruption. Donziger has vowed to continue to fight. He denies misconduct and is appealing the New York verdict that branded him a civil “racketeer.”

Patton Boggs, in contrast, ran up a white flag of surrender. To extricate itself from the tainted Ecuadorian case and separate itself from Donziger, the law firm agreed earlier this month to an extraordinary settlement” with Chevron, which had accused Patton Boggs of helping to cover up the Ecuadorian fraud. The firm withdrew from the pollution case, expressed “regret” that it had joined the campaign against Chevron, and even promised to pay the oil company $15 million as a symbol of contrition.

The concession to Chevron cleared the way for Patton Boggs to be absorbed into a firm now called Squire Patton Boggs. The death of Tommy Boggs underscores the end of a Washington institution.


Eric D. Schwerin
eschwerin@rosemontseneca.com

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